Marketing services update February 2012:

The end of 2011 was a very busy time for Cape Town Tourism marketing. We introduced our new campaign, “You don’t need a holiday, you need Cape Town,” locally at the AGM, and then internationally at WTM, and have been working on the subsequent roll-out thereof.

We have been able to capitalise on the World Design Capital 2014 and New7Wonders of Nature wins, with positive PR and significant media interest resulting in number of accolades for Cape Town from international media channels.

The New York Times included Cape Town in an article titled “Hip Cities That Think About How They Work”. The Condé Nast Traveler 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards named Cape Town the Top City to Visit in Africa and the Middle East for 2011, and The Huffington Post named Cape Town one of the Top 10 Most Popular Study-Abroad Cities. The Telegraph in the UK selected South Africa as one of the Top 10 Property Safe Havens Abroad.

We also continued to give major support at events like the Loeries, the Volvo Ocean Race, Cape Town Festival of Beer and the Cape Town Kite Festival; and we rewrote our Visitor’s Guide and launched our very first events calendar. Our summer campaign has been focused on ensuring that visitors to Cape Town have the right information and are encouraged to explore the entire metropole.

While the industry finished the year on a positive note, this does not mean we can rest on our laurels, and so the marketing team is beavering away on a number of fronts:

We are busy working on an upgrade to our website and our Cape Town Toolkit, which will give the trade locally and abroad much-needed tools to sell the destination and to adopt our campaign. Both will be launched in March, so watch out for that.

The next few months are busy from an events perspective: the Jazz Festival, Design Indaba, Argus, Cape Epic and Two Oceans Marathon are all happening. For all of these events we are doing media hostings with either international media or media from other parts of South Africa to ensure that we promote Cape Town as a wonderful city for year-round events. We are also focused on working with airline and hotel partners to encourage short city breaks by offering great events packages

In order to ensure that we sustain the momentum from summer, we are in the process of developing a very robust winter campaign that features great Cape Town deals over this period, encouraging people to travel to the city for food, wine, pampering and events. We will be chatting to members shortly on how you can get involved in this.

We are looking at supporting trade-familiarisation trips from our key source markets in the first six months of the year so that we can educate the trade on the full spectrum of what Cape Town has to offer. Our media hostings will continue to focus on uncovering the unexpected Cape Town.

We will be rolling out our new branding at the airports, and on the back of the City Sightseeing buses.

This quarter will also see the implementation of the three-cities alliance, which will see Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg collaborating at trade shows and events, using shared communications to promote the urban offering.

We are also developing a campaign focused on generating international demand, which will be launched in the second half of the year.

In addition, we will be completing the summer survey and commissioning a visitor insight study.